Next Wave Partnership - Embedding creativity and Learning into the making of the New Student Precinct
Image Credit: Zan Wimberly
The New Student Precinct is a proud creative partner of Next Wave, Australia’s pre-eminent arts organisation dedicated to the new generation in Australian art.
The partnership embeds arts and cultural experiences into the campus fabric in a time of change and disruption – through the multi-year construction period of the NSP. Next Wave have been tasked with curating artistic activations on campus and creating unique mentoring programs to involve students in their conception and delivery.
In 2018, students will have the opportunity to participate in a series of collaborative creative workshops led by artist collectives Centre for Everything, Public Assembly, Jamie Lewis and Dan Koop. A prize of $1500 will be awarded to a student to present their work at billboard-scale on the Parkville campus.
Deeply rooted in the Australian arts ecology, Next Wave has a 33-year track record of pushing creative careers to the next level through renowned development programs and a biennial multi-arts festival. This innovative partnership draws on Next Wave’s strong industry reputation within the arts as leaders in diversity, inclusion and professional learning for young and emerging creative voices.
The New Student Precinct will make a significant contribution to the transformation of the on-campus student experience at Parkville by delivering a world-class student hub for the whole campus community. It will be a vibrant centre of activity that will co-locate student services and activities closer to the new heart of the campus, and to primary transport links. Partnering with Next Wave provides the Project with the opportunity to engage students in the Arts and Cultural programming of the NSP while providing professional and personal development opportunities throughout the life of the project.
The Next Wave partnership has already resulted in four exceptional artist activations co-created with University student, alumni and staff :
SAM WALLMAN
A Student Rubbed Their Eyes, 2018
Ten aluminium composite material printed discs, 1200mm
The University of Melbourne was built by workers. Sam Wallman’s ten vignettes celebrate shifting social dynamics with a focus on moments of tension, solidarity and collective action in response to wider social and cultural movements. This work was researched in consultation with University students, staff and alumni.
Sam Wallman is a Walkley nominated comics journalist, political cartoonist and editor based in Melbourne, Australia. His drawings have been published widely, from the Guardian to the New York Times, the ABC and SBS. He was previously art editor for Overland Journal, and is currently a contributing editor to the publication. Sam’s work is primarily concerned with queer identity, the border, and the way politics intersects with our personal lives. He has self-published five books, including Fluid Prejudice, an anthology of comics and cartoons about marginalised Australian histories, and is currently editing an anthology of comics and cartoons around the topic of 'class'.
DEBORAH KELLY
Power/Play, 2018
Vinyl billboard, kedar edges, sail track, 4000x3000mm; two light boxes, duratran prints, A0
Power/Play uses material from the history of The University of Melbourne’s women’s magazine Judy's Punch to produce a multi-layered, cross-media mural. The rough and tumble aesthetic, with its gleeful plundering of history, its garish colours and riotous energy refers to an era that focused on women's craft, female camaraderie, and lost herstories; on dancing, joyous defiance, and a sense of limitlessness. Using light boxes and a billboard in dynamic interplay, Kelly combines the aesthetic and philosophical tenets of the movement with contemporary feminist discourse. The text within the lightboxes seeks to gently probe the kinds of issues more recent editions of Judy's Punch have been concerned with: Who gets to speak? Who owns feminism? Where does power lie now? Is patriarchy over? If so, for whom?
Deborah Kelly is a Sydney-based artist whose works have been shown around Australia, and in the Biennales of Singapore, Sydney, Thessaloniki, TarraWarra and Venice. 2017 saw her first international solo exhibition, VENUS ENVY, at the Kvindemuseet in Aarhus, Denmark. Her projects across media are concerned with lineages of representation, politics and history in public exchange. Most recently her work has been seen in Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Feminism at ACCA in Melbourne, in The Museum of Love and Protest at NAS Gallery Sydney, in 40 Years of Queer Art at Comber St Studios Sydney, and at the Unknown Festival of experimental Video in Portland, Oregon
KAWITA VATANAJYANKUR
Carrier 2, 2017
Vinyl billboard, kedar edges, sail track. 3400 x 5858mm
Carrier 2 explores the psychological, social and cultural ways of viewing and valuing women’s everyday labour. Referring to her performances as 'meditation postures', the artist undertakes physical and psychological experiments that test the limits of her body, playfully and painfully. The alluring, luminous colours in Vatanajyankur’s work are distinctive of the artist's aesthetic and tap into a globalized and digitally networked visual language of consumption and instant gratification. Her approach to self-objectification gestures to the dissonance of her experience of migrating to Australia, using the body as a site of submission and active resistance.
Kawita Vatanajyankur is a Thai-Australian artist, working primarily with video, photography and performance. Vatanajyankur has exhibited widely across Australia, as well as Asia and Europe. In 2015 she was a Finalist in the Jaguar Asia Pacific Tech Art Prize and curated into the prestigious Thailand Eye exhibition at Saatchi Gallery, London. In 2017, her work was presented at Islands in the Stream, a curated exhibition in Venice, Italy alongside the 57th Venice Biennale, Asia Triennale of Performing Arts at the Melbourne Arts Centre; as well as Negotiating the Future, a curated exhibition at the Asian Art Biennial Taiwan; and the Bangkok Art Biennale 2018. Her work is held in private collections in Australia, Asia, Europe and America. She is currently represented by Nova Contemporary, Bangkok, Alamak! Project, and Clear Edition & Gallery, Tokyo.
SIYING ZHOU
The Rehearsal Karaoke Booth for Our National Anthem, 2018
HD video, monitor, timber, acrylic, corrugated iron, golden foil, plastic microphone (Commission). Image credit: Zan Wimberley
The Rehearsal Karaoke Booth for Our National Anthem is a sculptural installation representing a liminal cultural space between the iconic architecture of the Australian bush, and a karaoke booth. The karaoke video, The National Anthem of AO-SSU-CHIU-LEE-YA, is a phonetic translation of the lyrics of the Australian National Anthem. The lyrics are written in Wade-Giles Romanisation syntaxes, a system created in the 19th century to pronounce Chinese characters for people from English-speaking backgrounds. Displaying a continuum of two phonetic translations between English and Chinese, this work provokes questions about the complexity of belonging in multicultural Australia. Posing as an invitation to participate and sing, the artist playfully probes at challenges to participation through the experience of translation and mimicry. Through absurdity and a comic surface, the work conveys an "in-between” cultural realm; neither this nor that.
Born in China, Siying Zhou is an interdisciplinary artist living in Melbourne. Her research-driven projects provoke questions around social conventions and cultural norms, often articulated through the hybrid material forms in her works. Zhou’s works have been exhibited nationally and internationally; most recently in group exhibitions: Changing Places (2017), Linden New Art, Melbourne and Ohrwurm (2016). Zhou has participated in residencies in Barcelona and Berlin. She has been awarded the John and Mary Kerley International Travel Scholarship 2016 and the National Gallery of Victoria Women’s Association Award twice in 2015 and 2017. Zhou has completed Master of Multimedia Design at the University of Sydney (2005), as well as a Master of Contemporary Art (2015), and a Master of Fine Art (2017) at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), the University of Melbourne.